Thanks! Brick is the obvious choice for that space, and I love it in the hallway as well. Someone asked me how I was going to clean it, and I just stared blankly....I am not planning on cleaning it, isn't that why brick floors exist, lol? We have picked a sealant that sinks in, this step has to be don't before they are grouted. The sealant will remove some of the loose lime but not enough to make a big difference. They made sample boards of bricks treated with different products, and I picked the one that has the least effect on the brick's appearance. A few of the "enhancers" actually ruined the brick as far as I am concerned. I kept repeating, "rustic....I want rustic..."

Three thoughts. (1) I don't know if this works without mocking it up, but you might try using an "x" grid in the space...I haven't seen a premade x rack that narrow, but I think it would work. (2) Wine Enthusiast sells modular racks that take up 4" per bottle + 1 3/8 inch extra on the sides...if you did three accross, that would be 13 3/8". That might fit? If not, you could probably make it fit by not using the outside mounting pieces, but rather attaching the racks directly to the cabinet sides. (3) Vintage View racks are meant usually to disaplay bottles sideways...but you could attach them to the sides instead, if you wanted. That would also give you 3 bottles accross. Alternately, you could bring the back forward and use one vintageview at the front, they are 12" wide and come 1, 2 or 3 bottles deep. At the cost of potentially holding fewer bottles it might allow an interesting/attractive presentation. See www.vintageview.com

what is the ambient temperature of the surrounding room? The assumption is that since it's in your basement, your floor above will be in a heated room - do you heat your basement too? Is your basement entirely subterranean or do you have 3 ft windows in it like mine? If you are entirely subterranean, and your ground temp is OK. you may not have to insulate the floor. Remember that it can be a heat sink and insulating it can actually raise the temp of the interior space. If your configuration is like I described, you need most insullation on the ceiling. The vibrations from your dishwasher won't be a problem anyhow - the dishwasher is above and it's hard to imagine how it would shake the floor of the wine cellar. I simply have the same concrete floor as the rest of the basement. My cellar is for storage, so I just wanted it to be functional. It's about the same size as you describe. Vapor barriers can be something to think about. If you have a large difference in temp between your cellar and the surrounding space, you can get condensation. in an unheated basement, the problem is more likely against the ceiling than the walls, but each place is different. Generally you put the vapor barrier against the warm side, but that's not a brilliant idea for a ceiling, especially if your joists and flooring is wood, which is probably the case. I don't understand your question about paint. What is your concern? Also, remember that greenboard doesn't really insulate all that well. I was worried about flooding in the basement even though we've never had any, so I used wonderboard, or cement board, like you would use for a bathroom. I also have six inch walls so I could put a lot of insullation in, and I built my own door which is also six inches. If you use extruded polystyrene, you get the maximum insulation per square inch. Thermax, which has foil on one or both sides, is slightly better but deteriorates over time and there is some literature about toxins, so rather than worry about any of that, I just used polystyrene. I also built my own wine racks. If you use individual racking, you lose a lot of space to air, but that is the most convenient for looking at your bottles. If you use some kind of bin, Rhone shaped bottles and anything that's slightly weird can be a real pain to stack. So I made shelves. A Bordeaux bottle is 3" diameter, a Burgundy bottle is about 3 1/4", but some of the Rhones are a little larger and things like Turley, or Champagne, or some Beaujolais, are even larger. So I made shelves spaced at 3 1/2 inches, with a few at the bottom that are 4" and the top which is about 5" for anything weird. That was the compromise that allowed me to get the maximum bottles with the least amount of lost space. Bins are better but as I said, a pain. I did one wall with bins and probably wouldn't do that again. For cooling, you have a lot of options. You can do a split system. You can get a Whisperkool or Breezeaire or something similar. But remember, those coolers are simply air conditioners. AC units don't go down below 65 or so because they'll ice up. So the compressors are sized slightly differently and the evaporation coils are sized slightly differently than the wine chiller units. If you got your AC to go to 60 or below, you wouldn't have adequate evaporation. So what to do? Get a larger unit. The smallest room AC is about 3000 BTU, or 5000 BTU, which is far more than you need to get that small room cool. If you trick it, you can get it to cool to the 50s or so and you're in good shape. I just bought a $99 Samsung and the temp is around 59 - 62 degrees F. You can pull the thermostat wire thru the grill, which gets you about 5 degrees right there, and you can tape a small resistor to it that gets you another few degrees, and you spent $99 for a cooling system that works fine. I'm not going to get into an engineering description of cooling systems, but people modify big ACs for meat lockers if they're hunters, and it actually works pretty good for a wine cellar. But a spare in case you burn it out and use the savings for more wine.

Do you want to store large numbers of similar bottles, or all different bottles? The type of storage will differ. If you will be storing similar bottles, you can use a bin system. Wine bottles nest. That is the necks of the bottles turned around, fit between a row of necks facing the other way. You can use this principle to store a lot of wine of the same type securely and in a relatively small amount of space, for example a space about 1 foot wide by 2 feet high by 14 inches deep will hold 45 bottles. If this is the system you want, I will measure our bins and tell you the dimensions and construction methods. We have made bins to hold from 20 to about 200 bottles.